DIGFM: LOgiCATOR (7/13/2017; Santa Clara, CA)

July DIGFM Meeting

LOgiCATOR

FileMaker’s Find mode is powerful, yet daunting to the average user. “Find” or “Omit”? “=“ or “==“? “*” or “@“? Multiple requests? Extend? Constrain? How can we make this power accessible to non-technical users?

Leveraging some great new features of FileMaker 16, LOgiCATOR is a slick, yet powerful module that can easily be integrated into a FileMaker application to present the user with a familiar and intuitive search interface like they’ve used in Mail, iTunes, and elsewhere. Best part is it’s free; we built it for the FileMaker developer and power-user community to add into their own applications. But we also built it to showcase features of FileMaker 16. LOgiCATOR’s author, Mark Scott, will demonstrate some of its features, then look under the hood to see how card windows, JSON, and other new FileMaker 16 features made all the difference.

About the Speaker

Mark Scott is a senior developer at Beezwax, having come from a first life as a scientist studying human immunodeficiency virus, human papillomavirus, and cervical cancer. Early in that career, he needed a tool to catalog a repository of study specimens that would eventually grow to well over 200,000 in number, and to store complex data sets of results from immunologic tests on those samples; he quickly discovered FileMaker. He’s since immersed himself in FileMaker for over two decades, developing expertise in all aspects of the platform and becoming a Certified (versions 12 and 14) FileMaker Developer. When not developing database tools, Mark can be found exploring the backroads of the San Francisco Bay area, practicing new songs on his guitar, and getting up to the Sierra Nevada mountains on a regular basis.

Keith - Yes!!! I use a lot of JSON for passing parameters in LOgiCATOR. I think it’s pretty cool. That said, if there’s something “much much cooler,” I’d consider abandoning JSON in a heartbeat. LOgiCATOR is still under refinement, with some significant changes in store for a “final” integration-ready version to be included with a forthcoming blog post. (“Final” in quotes; this will be the official “v1,” but there’s always more to come!) I hope to have that version ready to demo at DigFM. Thus, if you’re willing to share, I’d be much obliged.

Just to set appropriate expectations for attendees, this won’t be some sort of “Battle of the Parameter Passing Techniques” talk.

I’ll be presenting LOgiCATOR’s genesis and features, take a look at how our approach to modular design is now evolving in the FM16 era (card windows, etc.), look at how to integrate LOgiCATOR into existing systems (and strategies I followed to make that easy), and, if I still have time left after all that, take a quick glance at how we used the new JSON functions to store and pass complex, nested data structures, including some best practices for using JSON in that role.

If you’re wondering what the heck this LOgiCATOR thing is in the first place, a good place to find out about our new, modular search UI is our blog series (the first two parts here and here, including link to demo file).